Sunday, 21 March 2010

This gorgeous German made camera was produced between 1913 to 1934, this particular model was designed to take 6.5x9 glass plates but can also be used with film as well, all you have to do is find a roll film back to use the 120 format or, with a bit of patience you can “glue” some sheet film in some kind of board to fit in the dark slides.

This one came with the four original Voigtlander darkslides, I bought some extra four on ebay to start playing until I can get hold of the roll back which can be tricky to find.

To start I cut few pieces of cardboards on the size of the plates and then glued the sheet film on the board with a bit of honey, which seems to be the preferred method by some folks I spoke to. The film I used was the German Wephota 100 ISO, the size is a bit smaller than I thought and I had a quite hard time in the dark to place the film correctly onto the board, I tried hard to leave as symmetrical as possible but some of the pictures were not in level so I had to adjust in Photoshop.

The film was processed with Rodinal 1:100 solution one hour stand development, the results are quite good but the processing were not even, probably because I had to pre-soak the film in water in order to get rid of the honey… I don’t know. The negatives were scanned and only curves and levels were adjusted, I tried keeping as original as possible.

For those who are used to large format photography will be familiar with the camera's movement. You can focus through the glass window at the back just like any other large format camera or with the scale placed at the front. There’s also a viewfinder at the top of the lens and a spirit level.